Observing left of Cygnus

Observing "left" of Cygnus and a bit "down" reveals first a prominent pair of stars and then a remarkable large triangle of stars.

What is lost when a culture no longer offers an OLD story about these ? Far from Deneb and Sadr, I would be happier with a story about Antares that preserved both its distance and its size relative to our Sol and, say, Betelgeuse.

What is most worrying is if we lose the habit of observing the night sky, whether we construct our own asterisms or follow the houses of constellations from The East or from The West or those of a sci-fi series gone viral or whatever.

Observing the night sky through a lens has aspects which would surprise ... whether "splitting" binary stars or learning to "SEE" faint non-stellar objects.

Arendt missed so much when she went after the telescope, mouthing the certainties that Heidegger had flung at his old master, Husserl. The sons of Husserl are a story so unlike the Heidegger story.

---

 

Tarski or Heidegger: 1929 and 1930

From the years 1929 and 1930, Heidegger has left behind the work that marks his break with Husserl and phenomenology and some very clear signs of his embrace of Ernst Jünger and a radical conservative revolution - and an extreme cult "historical" nationalism that Heidegger never renounced and for which he never apologized to its victims - especially the Polish (mourning to Marcuse only the displaced Ost-Deutschen - the theme he likely took with Paul Celan.)

Tarski, on the other hand, left logic with ground-breaking work in each of those years.  One reason that I mention this is that Tarski was the teacher of Julia Robinson.

We now know the role that Husserl played in the fate of both Edith Stein and Afra Geiger: Heidegger worked briefly with the former and Hannah Arendt mentions the latter in her correspondence with him.  Jaspers reports being with Heidegger at Husserl's home in Freiburg and raising the case of his student, Afra Geiger.

Afra Geiger's fate was to perish in the Ravensbrück death camp.

Had Afra Geiger been accepted by Husserl, had Husserl not written his back-handed letter on Stein to the Göttingen philosophy department (and had they met in the open) both young philosophers might have survived.

When a young philosophy student - about to graduate - remarked to me that his university, having no graduate school, had no course on Heidegger - I tried to explain that this was no loss.  Better a course on Jaspers or Cassirer.  I should have said: better a course on Twardowski and Tarski.

And what of Cassirer? In 1942, Susanne Langer publishes "Philosophy in a New Key".  To read its last chapter and then the gnome's 1943 publication, "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit" is very sobering.  Imagine for a moment that Langer had any reason to feel that some lectures of hers in Germany in the early thirties had led to some misplaced enthusiasm for conservative extremism - imagine with what feeling she would have announced a correction, a clarification, in 1943 - or in subsequent editions.

Cassirer, like Paul Valéry, died in 1945 and so was not able to reply to Heidegger when he resumed teaching at Freiburg after his all-too-brief exclusion.  Valéry on poetry or Heidegger?  Michael Hamburger on Mallarmé or Walter Biemel deferring to the Master?

When Heidegger opens his lecture on Hölderlin and the Essence of poetry, he make a fallacious claim which Tarski would have disposed of immediately.  So even there, perhaps better Tarski on Mereology for poetics (which via Kit Fine leads back to the Husserl of the LU) than Heidegger on fate, the people and historical up-rising.

Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes

In 1949 Heidegger had the opportunity to a add a preface to the 3rd edition of his Vom Wesen des Grundes.  He took the occasion to close an additional preface as follows:

Wie wäre es, wenn die Besinnlichen begännen, auf diese seit zwei Jahrzehnten wartenede selbe Sache endlich denkend einzugehen?

When you hear that Heidegger was unapologetic, it can help to remember that twenty years earlier he had celebrated a Fest for Husserl in the company of Edith Stein with whom he had worked on the Husserl texts for inner time consciousness.  Stein had since perished in the Holocaust.
Let us turn to the ending of the book:

dem Dasein als Selbst das Erwachen der Antwort des Mitseins, im Mitsein mit dem es die Ichheit darangeben kann, um sich als eigenliches Selbst zu gewinnen.

It is difficult to read such a closing passage knowing that the Master had a chance to add a thoughtful rewording with less of Self and individual.  Consider this: his one case of collaboration also dates back to 1928 (the year he says gave us his Kant book and this book on "grounds" or "reasons") and in his editor's introduction to that book he suggests that Edith Stein had worked on it as a steno who had added the chapter and paragraph divisions to a "transcription".

Nothing in the closing of the Grounds book evokes You or We.  This is the author who ridiculed Schelling as being a mere "thinker" and not a "philosopher" - this is Heidegger who took the concept of "horizon" and "Eigenwelt" and reached his greatest depths of profundity in evoking the "world" and "transcendence".

So in some matters he was a thoughtless fool and ingrate.  But he also seems to suggest that this book has been denied its readers those past twenty years - and that it is what they have been waiting for (Heidegger is at the time not banned from publishing but banned from teaching.)  What grounds might we have for distrusting the insight of the Master?

One reassuring possibility for his concerned, thoughtful reader is that the mere Schrift of an Edith Stein on empathy and others could not be expected to have interested Heidegger - or yet another possibility is that he also repeatedly neglected to actually read the work of his former lover and later confidante, Hannah Arendt.

But there is a philosopher with whom he will not now be able to communicate, an author who converted to the Catholicism of his youth, with whom he worked closely, the trusted secretary of his own former Master - Edith Stein.

To turn Heidegger on himself: we need not ask for the "reason" that he makes no mention, exposes no regret, but we can be open to someone evoking the "ground" for this neglect.

on Arendt: notes

In Goshgarian's translation of Courtine-Denamy's "Three Women in Dark Times" I find this astonishing statement concerning Arendt:

that her "career", which had, doubtless, been assured in advance in Germany, would be jeopardized until she managed to win recognition in her adopted land

If the author means by "career" that of a philosopher in Germany, does she mean the graduate of 1929 to whom Japsers would not accord full honours - when (according to Alasdair MacIntyre's research) Edith Stein had no hope of a position in 1919?  What had changed in that decade?  Where were these openings in the German university system for women as philosophers who were born Jews?  Or is this veiled irony?  I don't think so - it is merely naive when considering the author of a book on Rahel.

Arendt was ranked first out of the "Top Ten" by Camille Paglia (always able to get a reaction.)
Here was my irrate response (minus typos and omissions):

How could Ayn Rand have displaced someone of the stature of Susanne Langer? Are we  seriously to believe that Arendt is a more significant philosopher than Philippa Foot? Than Iris Murdoch? Does Rand out-rank Edith Stein? In what possible sense? Could Rand out-rank Simone Weil?

Of course Paglia was just trying to irritate with not mentioning Sontag in the top ten ... or my least favourite, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.

This was 2005 - no Judith Butler, no Judith Jarvis Thomson.

What remains sobering is to see the list of "chairs" and past notables at Collège de France - but then do the French really think of Madame Curie as Maria Skłodowska, a Pole born in Warsaw at a time when it was under the Russian empire?

Arendt was born in Königsberg - ask any man in the street what piece of Russia lies south-west along the Baltic from Lithuania ... it's like asking where is the Russian autonomous Jewish republic, or Еврейская автономная область - the Hebrew Autonomous Region - with its reported 1.2% ethnic Jews - might be.  If the French have forgotten Danzig, we would do well to forget the city of Kant.

Arendt: her master philosopher was her fate (and it is that which will place a seal on her reputation.)

a note on ad hominem consideration of a line of argument

ad hominem is sometimes lumped together with attacking the example someone chose to illustrate a point rather than their argument [or, if you insist, "the" argument.]

But consider Michael Martin on R. Taylor's case for teleology and design.  Martin's 1990 book reports that Taylor had occasion to respond to critics but that he did not reply (although someone sympathetic to his argument, Creel, did reply.)

When we are asked to consider such things as "I think that what Philo was trying to say ... " or "I think that what Philo may have intended was ..." then the failure to respond can be more than a refusal of dialog - especially so if the argument or line of thought has been published as a non-specialist text.

In Taylor's case, his book "Metaphysics" was not aimed just at the specialist, but also at a more general reader and likely had the philosophy student in mind.

That an effort to defend or clarify is seen to fail, is one thing. To fail to make that effort is quite another.  Whether due to arrogance, or unwillingness to retract, or due to pride or neglect, it is a moral failing of the philosopher.

Sometimes the philosopher's choice of where to speak can be likened to the choice of a regrettable example.   Peter Singer launched a storm of irrational and emotional protest by proposing to speak on medical ethics and the termination of life at Uni. Marburg/Lahn.  This location was construed as no idle choice for the organizers and no doubt Singer was ignorant of the history of the Marburg University medical clinic in the Nazi "T4" program (and the university's readiness to hire Nazi medical staff after the war.

To make matters worse, Marburg, untouched in the war, failed to rebuild the great synagogue destroyed in the November Pogrom.  Marburg and the surrounding area had failed to find even a small lane to bear the name of Hermann Cohen (other streets bear the names of academic notables - Cohen merited only a small plaque at the old university.)  For years the inscription at the old site was in memory of those residents of Marburg who feel in the war ( a slight variant on typical village memorials to Great War heros which one finds in small towns in the area.)

Once Marburg psychiatric housing had been emptied, it served to house slave labourers for the Noble dynamite factory at near-by Allendorf (per documentation at the archive of the University of Minnesota.)

Historians indicate that public objections to Action-T4 had an affect on the Nazi regime: there is no historical record that any public objections by Marburg notables were ever made such as might have served to spare the Jews of Marburg, the home of theology and philosophy and sometime home to the industrious Brothers Grimm.

When a philosopher from Marburg says nothing (Heidegger never returned to Marburg to urge the rebuilding of the synagogue - nor did the illustrious Hannah Arendt) it can be as serious a concern as when a philosopher choses to advocate mercy killing in a town which has yet to come to terms with its complicity in willful human slaughter.  It brings into question who is that "we" who are ready to engage Peter Singer in that particular dialog no matter how impressive his line of argument.  The city of Marburg is not yet that place.  Tourists arriving to see the St Elizabeth church and enjoy shopping in the quaint streets are able to enjoy their visit most often without having once to consider who is missing from the scene.  A building advertises the Grimm brothers worked here; no building says "the family Rosenberg had a business here prior to ..." or "This house was purchased below market price after the Rosenberg family ...".  They need not advertise: but the plaque needs to be there to be read by this generation and the next and perhaps even one more after.  And the synagogue must be rebuilt.  link: History page of the tiny renewed Jewish community of Marburg.

Replying to Husserl: working notes

prima facie case for revisiting Husserl: the merits of Colin McGinn's phenomenology in Mindsight
   pdf review
and his treatment of Hume; compare and contrast with Husserl's responses to Hume

...
Iris Murdoch on Husserl in MGM and various in S of G ex: the lack of a telos.
...
Science and the Nations:  Raymond Aron (irony, RA introduced J-P S to Huss and Heid)
   RA on philosophy of history
   the effort to prohibit aerial bombardment through amendments to Geneva conventions
   the case for international law
...
  1935  Husserl on the gypsies as outside European life though present throughout
  wp
         In 1934, Reinhardt and Parisian violinist Stéphane Grappelli formed the "Quintette du Hot Club de France"
...
  EH and the West - as if there had not been China or India - or Jerusalem.  The assimilated Jewry of Europe in shock and dismay at the threat to the "immanent telos" of civil society and academe - and within 2 years he is driven out - within 3 years out of his home - and dead.  Q:  the fate of his wife and son?
   Despite his comment on India, if in fact Jeshua the Nazarene had studied as a Buddhist healer in India, this cultural gap would not be as he imagines - and the fact that these Causcasians are speaking an Indo-European language?  But he is looking for his European entelechy (if this had been embraced, would Poland have been spared?  Where did Russia stand in this group? )
...
  Was his Europe (1935) based more on Greece or more on the Salic laws ?  This was not a remnant of a Greek Empire but a Roman Empire - and on its northern fringe, the Salic traditions.  That Greek world came ot Europe through Arabia - but to a Europe that already had something of an "ethos" very distinct from that of Ionia or Athens or the Attic.  His mathematics - a mix of Greek and Indian and Arab and then European.
...
Science without universals: (contra Husserl's characterization of the actual practice of science)
   the particular star, Sol
   a particular planet [but one of a family of terrestrial planets, yet the only one with oceans and continents]
   plate tectonics
   a particular instance of carbon-based life on a planet
   DNA/RNA - only one particular form of life
   Luna - the moon illusion
   Galileo and the one planet Jupiter - Q:  a brown dwarf or not?  A singluar-historical question?
   the one cosmos [cp: Lee Smolin ]

   the inability to reduce mathematics to logic
...
  the conflation of "appearances" and the "data" of science (the Humean error )
...
   Bacon
   technical mastery of nature
     Leiss "The Domination of Nature"
...
  EH on the "validity" of his phenomenological discovery/adumbration of a world as horizon of an experience

  IM  literary criticism in contrast to physical science: freedoms and constraints, the good and the true

It seems clear that Husserl's views on science in the early 1930's came to colour what was known as phenomenology for decades in the English-reading philosophy world.

In particular, authors such as Charles Taylor have a certain appeal to some readers based on the presumed case against "natural science" where the "human sciences" are concerned.  Taylor often refers to Habermas and Habermas takes the Husserl case against natural science as a given - only he goes a step or two further.
A large part of the case against "secularism" hearkens back to the doctrine that an attitude perhaps appropriate in "natural science" is misplaced in the humanities - and in advise to our leaders both political and academic.

In the days when behaviourism and instrumentalism passed as scientific psychology and philosophy of psychology, respectively, in North America, I was sympathetic to this case against "the natural attitude" in considering the prospects for "human psychology".  My sympathies have since shifted to the need for a philosophical anthropology which might better inform our assessment of scientific psychology in terms of goals, means and presuppositions.

Quentin Lauer's 1965 translation of a post-1935 "Crisis in Science" essay gave English readers access to what previously had been largely eluded to in the more popular literature on the existential phase of phenomenology

The casual reader of the "Krisis" essay might be advised to realize that Husserl had spent a great deal of time with some of the most prominent thinkers in twentieth century mathematics, such as Cantor at Halle.

Why might this be well-advised?  Take for example the 1994 book published by Northwestern U: Lawrence Vogel's The Fragile "We". In his brief treatment of Heidegger's own engagement in politics, there is no mention of Jaspers.  The one mention of Husserl is merely in passing, late in the text.

By 1935, on this view, Heidegger had outstripped his master and by 1937 the master would indeed be stripped. This despite the long-standing concern of Husserl for the I and the others.  Heidegger, with no background in mathematics or science and impressed by language (the "furrow" of the field is indeed a very old part of "culture" but Heidegger never actually farmed a field or handled a plow - his favoured tools were the pen, the pipe, the walking stick, the Bavarian cap and sturdy hiking boots.  Elfride handled the technology of cookery) took his cue from Duns Scotus.  Working under Rickert and Husserl (Husserl would take Rickert's chair at Freiburg), Heidegger finds his later themes in an author, Duns Scotus, immensely far removed from the author who most concerned Kant and then Husserl: Hume.

Anecdote: some years ago I spent an evening listening to Mahler with a prominent British philosopher - a philosopher specializing in mathematics and space-time geometry.  That evening he told me of how impressed he was by his current reading of Arendt on the Nazi in Jerusalem - particularly concerning what he had now learned about the Danish King and the Nazis.  Looking back, I see that evening as just one more in a series that led inexorably to his divorce.  Philosophers can be fundamentally mistaken about a great many things, especially experts in quite narrow fields.  In their wider reading, they may rely much more on the rhetoric, the style, the tone of an author than they would in reading within their specialty.  A philos0pher of physics inclined to advocate a humane socialism has little time for casual reading and is likely to eschew writing by known conservatives - the tone, the rhetoric, risks being too aggravating to be suited to a relaxing distraction for the strenuous mental tasks of professional specialization.

Husserl ventured to speak very generally.  His rhetoric is not essential to an argument, but it is essential to his having readers of his argument. I would like to consider that rhetoric.

"Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man" begins with a bit of a howler: the analogy we are offered is that concerning scientific medicine versus folk medicine.  Why this analogy?

It is not merely that every sort of superstition was flourishing in Europe ... that was nothing new.  True, inexpensive printing had created a wider audience for novel variants on old themes, but I suggest, there was nothing really new.  What Husserl was addressing was the Heidegger phenomenon.

[ Claude Bernard on medicine;  Jaspers and Hans Jonas; current:  GC
    JB  JV  C d Fr  chaires  2 femmes  disparus  immortels  discours   podcasts  
    CIP  JFP   CT  "the immanent frame"  SSRC  R & PS  S of R   JH contra 

]

[ la leçon inaugurale M-P   I.H.

Anne F-L [Chaire De Philosophie Des Sciences Biologiques Et Médicales - Leçon Inaugurale Anne Fagot-Largeault  PDF

Les expressions « sciences de la vie et de la santé », ou « sciences biologiques et médicales », qui sont d’usage courant, sont redondantes. Les sciences médicales font évidemment partie des sciences biologiques.
...
La philosophie des sciences est ma formation première, la médecine une formation seconde.
...
« Il faut transporter la philosophie dans la médecine et la médecine dans la philosophie. »
...
Etre médecin n’est pas neutre philosophiquement.
...
L’évolution scientifique de la médecine, c’est-à-dire l’incorporation à la médecine des impératifs de la recherche, et d’une recherche instrumentée, technologique, est souvent assimilée à une déshumanisation. D’aucuns parlent de « barbarie technoscientifique », de « glissade vers l’enfer biomédical ». Et ce qui est souvent préconisé pour éviter la dérive technoscientifique est un retour en arrière. On cherche dans les médecines dites douces des recettes ancestrales, on rêve d’un « retour à Hippocrate » (thème récurrent et illusoire, car la médecine hippocratique se voulait rationnelle, et elle n’était pas douce).
]

[ R & SS Coll de Fr ]
[attacks on medecine as quackery: Molière, Flaubert]
[ the reality of palliative care; morphine and the death of Freud; thanatology; euthanasia ]
[Mengele and the spectre of medecine; psychiatric abuses in the West and in USSR ]
[ link

Georges Canguilhem : Philosophie et Médecine

10/06/2005, Collège de France, Paris

]

[Collège de France - Recherche en psychiatrie : pathologies multiples, modèles communs ? link ]

[Conférence "Merleau-Ponty, Le corps en acte" Collège de France (Inv. by Bernard Andrieu) link]

[Colloque de rentrée, les 15 et 16 octobre 2009 link pdf  ]

[U of C  SCNL  ]

[ru  IP UNESCO World Philosophy Day  ]

[Egbert Scheunemann

"Habermas‘ Philosophie ist der Versuch, das Projekt der Moderne, also die Entwicklung

der modernen Zivilisation, als – in der Tradition Kants – dreigestaltige Rationalitätsentfaltung

zu begreifen: als Prozess der Differenzierung der kognitiv-instrumentellen, der

normativ-praktischen und der ästhetisch-praktischen Vernunftsdimension sowie der immer

weiteren Ausdifferenzierung dieser Dimensionen entsprechend immanenter Logik."

]   PKR  

There is a common view today that Heidegger had somehow brought Husserl to his senses.  I am troubled by this view: Heidegger's major contribution to Husserlian phenomenology had been his work with Husserl's assistant, Edith Stein, in preparing "The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness" lectures for publication.  Husserl had a history of dissatisfaction with his own formulations and a history of quasi-new beginnings, more often new forays with the same problematic in mind.  Now he was faced with the rising star of Heidegger.  No other figure on the intellectual scene had so embraced his phenomenology.  I imagine Husserl struggling to grasp what was becoming of his hard-won achievements in regions, passive and active genesis, co-constitution, Urwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt in the metaphysics/ontology rhetoric of Heidegger.

Husserl's next fallacies are double: reductionism and the notion that social institutions are formed of their individual members.  Let us being with the latter.  Take Heidegger and Arendt's own Marburg: the social institutions of Marburg were in no way disrupted either by the burning of the great synagogue (never rebuilt) in Marburg or the loss of the community of Jews in that university town with its theology college.  True, there is no Hermann-Cohen Weg or Strasse - but there is a small plaque at the old university.

[ reductionism  ( ex: Freud to Binswanger;)  agency, action, causality ]
[ intentionality reference mental-contents ]
[ dasein versus "the person"; public | personal | private ]
[ psychologism ]
[ mechanism and explanation ]
[ mathematical objects ]
[ natural kinds and universals in language and in logic ]
[ history and Dilthey ]
[ cultural artifacts ]
[ intuition and insight ]

[science and the taste of the soup (Einstein)
   Zu-Hause-sein
   a typical morning at home over coffee with Bach: husband and wife (normal day, unremarkable)
      as circumstance to be described, to be explained, to be characterized, to be diagnosed
      as narrative
      as social "instance" - roles, gender, niveau, privacy, property, stability (peace time), religion
      non-remarkable conversation and inconsequential reading
      variant example: disclosure of infidelity
        objective risk to the spouse (Wien, Prag, Paris or Berlin 1935)
        objective assessment of the response of the injured party
        jurisprudence
        moral assessment, remembering and forgiving
        the medical viewpoint (Arthur Schnizler)
        as preserved as a poem
        as communicated in a letter (family; friend)
        social: stigma and reaction of significant others; penalties
]
Take the case of Estonia and its neighbours.  The towns do not vanish because their inhabitants have been shipped to Kazakhstan.
Take the case of Poland: a minor pogrom occurred even after World War II had ended.
The simplistic view that societal forms are built on the minds of the individuals found in them negates a century or more of Geisteswissenschaften.

[ Alfred Schütz, Adorno, Marcuse ]

Let's move on to the next rhetorical move: the mentions of infinities.  By 1935 some of Husserl's listeners should have known that "infinities" occurring in mathematics are an entirely different concern from "infinities" occurring in formulations in physics.  The topic cannot be introduced without a clear demarcation between mathematics and physics.  Essential considerations are glossed over.

Perhaps it is because Husserl was a Jew converted to Lutheranism that he failed to appreciate the supra-individual nature of a centuries old institution such as Heidegger's Catholic tradition.

Husserl proceeds with a rhetoric of "Theoria" already utterly biased ( a bias that will perpetuate in the work of Habermas) - a rhetoric devoid of the actual historical science required to explicate the rise of scientific medicine, the mathematization of mechanical motion, of optics and the nature of categories and classification in the emergence of modern chemistry.

In 1935, Husserl could not be expected to image that we would one day be obtaining positron-emission tomographs of individual brains during the performance of typical tasks.  In 1971, when I took biology with a new textbook, electron microscopes had not yet demonstrated the structural nature of the so-called "cell membrane" in relation to the so-called "nuclear membrane" in typical cells of our bodies.  A reticulating structure was named and some partial views offered.

Husserl could not have anticipated, any more than my own philosophy professors in the 1970's, that certain types of phenomena deemed unsuited to scientific explanation due to their "randomness" would fall prey first to catastrophe theory and then be encompassed in the domain of chaos theory (René Thom was only born in 1923.)  By the time Kolmogorov visited Gottingen, Husserl was in Freiburg.


What remains in how best to conceive of mind in relation to science.  Where Husserl would suspend metaphysics in the sense of "bracketing" ontological commitments which functioned as obfuscating presuppostions, Heidegger was already moving to his radical demolition, demotion, un-founding.  Husserl, anxious for a secure foundation for science which would not degenerate into sheer scientism where mathematics and human knowledge were concerned, had somehow abetted the launch of anti-science.


The problem with the rhetoric by which Husserl invites the listener, the reader, to consider his appeal for the need of a pure science of the essence of human spirit is that he has already needlessly undermined science and history in making his case.  His later readers would lump the failures of eidetic science with the failures of metaphysics and the greatest failure: science.  Husserl's openess to a certain relativism - a relavitism to which his own philosophy would be immune - was one of far too many concessions.


In some ways the very history of Husserl's phenomenology was its own undoing: his early sympathizers could not follow him into an idealism excused by its being "transcendental".  In the case of Merleau-Ponty, even the eidetic reduction itself would be rejected and phenomenology would merge into variant of a descriptive psychology only to be displaced by the structures of language and the very temporal, relativized, historicized achievements of aesthesis.


When Husserl urged that we recognize horizons, he could not have imagined the doctrine of our being cast into the historical world.  In his own case, it is hard to imagine a figure in philosophy less suited to making the case for a careful reassessment of the spiritual situation of Europe in 1935.


The eventual conflation of science with technique in Heidegger and of science with theoria infected with bias and disguised in social speech acts in Habermas may have slightly different routes, or "paths",  Habermas certainly made a serious reading of Husserl on "the natural attitude" but with an entirely different project in re-thinking the use of human knowledge in the social world.


What is perhaps a shame in hindsight is that we have few clues as to what Heidegger might have taught had he been allowed to resume teaching in Berlin or Heidelberg in the new academic year of 1945-46.  By that time, with Max Weber dead for a quarter century and had Jaspers been lost in a forced march (which, as it happens, he narrowly escaped) and with Elfride hosting faculty and student soirées, we might have more accounts of the view of the master on the triumph of American technology over the leading people of Europe - and the use that the Asiatic hordes might yet make of the technological devices shipped to them from America and now lurking in the East or of the need to reclaim Ost-Preussen, to restore the eastern border.


We have no idea of what Husserl might have thought and taught in the psot-war, as he had died a few months before Kristalnacht.


During the time that Arendt was hoping to see a Heidegger tome on Logik, no mention is made in their correspondence of the fate of the logicians of Warsaw, no mention of the Jews of Poland- as if this were some Polish issue - this despite the very origins of the family name, Nietzsche.


Where Heidegger had Duns Scotus, the salient philosophers for Arendt were Augustine and Plato - but in 1929, when Husserl was being honoured in the presence of Heidegger and Edith Stein, Arendt was only a student who had graduated with less than full honours the previous year (her dissertation had a routine printing in Berlin in 1929.)   Unlike Iris Murdoch [see John Bayley on home with Iris], Husserl and his wife were driven from their home [...]


Heidegger's most curious remarks are that the "Juden" lost were "Ost-Deutschen" - which perhaps he took to include those of Poland and Ukraine [see the exception of Bulgaria.]


[Arendt's 1926 semester under Husserl]


[Jaspers-Heidegger Korr./Briefwechsel ]


[Iris Murdoch on Husserl; on ethics - that an ethics must also point us toward the good and be itself informed by that good; cp Arent and Jaspers on the lack of character in Heidegger (a nice enough chap in his way, not generally offensive, as was his wife, Elfride) ]


[Heidegger's failure to mention Arendt; the lost dedication to Husserl; the break with Jaspers ]


[the rescue of the Husserl papers: imagine if this had been undertaken by Heidegger, or at his behest; Van Breda and the role of the Belgian government and diplomats in the 1938 rescue of the papers; look for corr. with Heid or leading pupil in Frei. or Hdlbrg]


[
Eh characterization of philosophy - without sufficient regard to the Stoics or the role of rhetoric and law; 
his neglect of poesis
]
[
EH on a norm within a life (was he thinking of MH here - when he says not developed in every person ??)
]
[EH account of the idea in history - cp.  the Tao and Confucianism
    the manner in which the Dao became a religion and ceased to be an ethos would not sit well here
    the manner in which a religio without temples became the religion of cathedrals (cp the origins of the synagogue
]
[events in Marburg and the failure to rebuild the 1897 synagogue (the only building "lost" in Marburg in 1933-1945]
[

The Nazi Persecution
of the Gypsies

Guenter Lewy

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

2000

]
[T4 link with Marburg
"
Physicians, the most highly Nazified professional group in Germany, were key to the success of "T-4," since they organized and carried out nearly, all aspects of the operation
"
Marburg-related documents: (1)  + ease with which NS psychiatrists came to Uni Marburg after WWII

"petites personnes", suspicion and distrust

The many readers of "Herzog" were not mere nobodies in the literary career of Saul Bellow.

Eliade, Ricoeur and Taylor. The latter, the Canadian philosopher, finds himself referenced in the Vienna lectures on recognition, but somehow a credit to Gabriel Marcel on the gift is missing.

Marcel converted, but I am not aware of a note by Ricoeur on his remaining a Protestant and his distance from the Catholic Church (so very different for the Anglicans or American Lutherans and Episcopalians.)

Les Fonds Ricoeur, in an official response to Robert Lévy, offer us des petites personnes and their preoccupations, I suppose.

In France, Ricoeur came to be recognized - the fulfillment of his career, his professional life. In America, he was at none other than U. Chicago.

I cannot help wondering if he may have seen the flawed Russian film, "The Return", prior to his lectures in Vienna on recognition.

Consider these nobodies. Some remain without any distinguishable religious beliefs but remain uncomfortable when it is announced that there will be a new assessment by eminent scientists of what behavior (not behaviour) distinguishes our own species from earlier primates and hominids.

Eliade was required reading in so many colleges, required by professors who were certain that there is always the need for faith.

Taylor is so crass as to toy with his readers: "Is that all there is?"

I wonder about capable scientists and judges whose careers meet with no acclaim: a few publications and few  judgments over-turned on appeal and those appeals upheld.

In one collection of Taylor's essays in technical philosophy, a "grey essay" appears: an unpublished "paper".  It is now common to create posthumous "Collected Works" in which each and every scrap finds its place in the master's legacy.  But the fate of the "grey papers" of Ricoeur?

Ricoeur's own turn of phrase in the English translation seems most apt for Taylor: "the rhapsody of ideas".  Eliade will eventually be placed with Arendt, a "writer" and not a "researcher" and a writer with an agenda.

Against the lot, I prefer Milosz responding, if you will, to Raja Rao, or Avishai Margalit's "argument" against what has no spiritual reality for him.  Milosz has his contradictions, Margalit his modesty.

But then there is Jaspers and his letters to Arendt.  Jaspers is in Luxembourg, already stripped of academic office, under a publishing ban, and he does not manage to get his wife, a Jew, to Switzerland.  Yet he will take exception to post-war legislation and exile himself to Basel.  With Husserl stripped, Jaspers stripped, Ricoeur heads off for a summer of '39 in Munich.

The little people, the mere readers, are to follow Ricoeur in his meanderings, in his distrust of science.  We could ignore Sartre, who knowingly took the philosophy teaching post of a sacked Jew, from whom there is almost nothing to be learned.  Almost nothing.

Then there are the elderly readers: new publishers spring up in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, publishing Festschrift and more, plump with a nostalgia for their old days in the DDR, all their plays produced, all their books in the schools, summer cottages, travel abroad.  We may have lingering hopes of transcendence, they had literature, quoting Northrop Frye and Marx and Stalin and never a mention of the Stasi.  No, "I regret having informed on your son, having over-heard him talking in his room to his friends when I was a guest in your home."  For that we have "The Lives of Others".

Ricoeur's lectures close with a false opposition of Levinas-Husserl.  There is a gap. The between.  The attentive reader knows that it is bridged for Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Catholic, Protestant.

The real attack on science and technology is, I believe, actually an attack on science and history.  "Teknik" is a smokescreen, not unlike Leiss on "domination".  After a lifetime devoted to "lived experience" and "co-constitution", all that I have left is a confidence in poesis and a willingness to continue to read.  And a growing measure of disgust.

But there is also validation, when the reader recognizes in the learned author the same longing, the same nostalgia for the transcendent.  At that point the author must be trusted.

Missing from the Ricoeur narrative is the avowal of a past falsified, an apology to Gusdorf.  My only corrective is to re-read Beckett's "Murphy", Beckett having been a true hero of resistance.  Not just another liar, poseur, windbag.

The message of Ricoeur is that phenomenology will be of no avail.  I disagree.  We require now a phenomenology of combat, to understand how we came it embrace grapeshot, boiling tar, fragmentation grenades, landmines that only maim, machine guns.

One of the pioneers of powered flight could not bear that we would fly to murder.  Not kill in combat.  Murder.  The synchronization of machine gun with propeller was a major triumph.  Now we are faced with theocracies who are in pursuit of nuclear arms, an Islamic nation with nuclear arms which is only one step from theocracy.  A liar aims for the American Presidency and another liar occupies the highest effective office in the secular state of Turkey.  Turkey, whose armies were stopped at Vienna.

If we cannot embrace science and history without religion, ethics without religion, law without religion, then we may not be armed well enough to survive the collective slouch to reassuring fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism is not some marginal deviation.  It is the core.

Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians would have us believe that we can have science and history and all the old certainty in the God who would watch a boy hang for a piece of bread, a girl buried alive. We can be reassured.  We must restore the strength of our institutions, ensure the soundness of our library collections, our curricula.

So far blind trust in a Bible-believing President has brought us only a war in Iraq after a botched effort against the Taliban. Distrust and suspicion was not enough to prevent a pointless war against an Iraqi dictator, a modest dictatorship when compared to North Korea, Cuba or China.  A war begun with remote-control missiles, cruise missiles.  A war that claims precision, but cannot perform an inventory of ammunition dumps (what could the rag-heads use artillery shells for anyway?)

When we read our political commentators for insight, when we try to form an opinion, we do go forward with a certain trust.  There is a rhetoric which ensures this trust.  To read the apologies for the old DDR and its writers and critics is a lesson I will not too soon forget.  And there is a rhetoric of the philosophers who write about "the really big questions" - especially those who seem to have no one answer, no system to offer us, such as Ricoeur, a Protestant, and Taylor, a Catholic.

With the doyen of American philosophers, Hilary Putnam, having made a complete tour of the positions available to him, the little people might be excused for believing that there is no progress in philosophy and that perhaps a theology which suits the President is not so disreputable after all.  Anthony Flew finds his God.  (it could be an effect of the aging brain and no President would confess a loss of faith.)  And we, the mere readers, are still waiting for even a small group of philosophers to emerge who are able to address those of us who are reluctant to concede that all and anything that separates us from the hominids before us is our brain anatomy and chemistry, our social relations of dominance and exchange, and behavior (linguistic and emotive.)

To read a philosopher and know him to have failed to address his greatest public failings (were the camps for Officers not public arenas with publishing? ) - to read that Gusdorf elided the profanity and obscenity that punctuates military speech - and then you have heard the man.  Ricoeur was sent to make amends at a school which had been exemplary during the war.  Knowing what we now know about the extent of French collaboration - knowing something of how very differently the Poles comported themselves - perhaps the University of Chicago needs to reflect on the buffoons and worse whom it has ensconced on occasion: beginning with Tillich, Arendt, Eliade, Ricoeur and now Taylor.

I was taught that what was different about the Kennedy administration is that he brought in brains from Chicago.  Now we have a taste of Chicago in the White House and a President, a lawyer, who may still consider a vague theology and disreputable sermons to be somehow more fundamental than science and history.

Einstein claimed that science cannot give you the taste of the soup.  In many ways he was wrong, as our new views of beaches, clouds and human feeling amply demonstrate.  Professors assure their students that philosophy is not about the meaning of life, but also guide their best students away from disciplines such as history and philosophy of history, literature and philosophy of literature risking that those fields can tolerate mediocre efforts with little harm.

Major universities use their endowments to help ensure that work that is deserving of publication is published and often that every notebook and every set of lecture notes appears in bound collected works.  Most of us will only see the volumes that were aimed at the intelligent reader, the discerning reader (although the need to translate German and French texts for English markets might lead you to wonder how serious those readers are thought to be, unilingual, under-educated or merely language-challenged.)

Translations of lectures by a philosopher, published by a university press, suggest that this work merits reading.  With few books of philosophy finding their way into American public libraries, my copy of The Course of Recognition from hclib.org might yet be replaced by Le Parcours from a participating inter-library loan institution.  I wonder: were these lectures a strange avowal of his personal need and of his feeling of being threatened given what befell Eliade?  Did he see himself in a portrayal by Bellow?  Had his wife died without knowing why a Croix de Guerre with such connections had been consigned to resume teaching in a backwater?  Had we known, would there have been an interdiction?  Should there have been?

My own suspicion is that Ricoeur had read pre-war writing of Jaspers that were easily misread.  Mikel Dufrenne is gone, Gusdorf is gone, and so we, mere readers, not scholars, may never have an answer.  On the shelf behind, first to hand, the books of Paul Ricoeur.  Books on almost everything ever dear to me.  Husserl.  Metaphor.  Narrative.  Freud.  Books in which the author's best hunch, his hard-earned insight, his daring direction, are essential to the reader and his reading and what he shapes from this reading in his very own speech and thought and musings.  In what he advises his children, his friends.  Imperfect.  Flawed.  But not "essentially" flawed?

In these writers there can be no separation of the writer from his work.  This is not science, this is not history, this is not mathematics.  They do not offer an argument, a line of argument, from which you might divorce them, abstract them.  They are in the lineage of Lessing, Nietzsche and Heidegger - they must themselves be read - and any unadvised reader will be hostage to the translator.

If we were to discover evidence that Jeshua, the Nazarene, a stone-cutter, had left behind a wife somewhere along the Ganges, the wife who taught him to speak and ensured more work for him, his father, his brothers, would that, could that, now be irrelevant?  If the Vietnamese on the Chinese wife of Ho are any indication, it is not so.  This would not be youthful indiscretion.  Behold the man.